Cannot remove/unregister VMs

[VMmatty]

Prior to upgrading to vSphere 4 I had a test environment running VMware View. I upgraded to vSphere but did not remove the desktop pools or anything else from View first. Unfortunately even though I've removed the pools from the View interface, I am left with two VMs that I am unable to remove or manage. They are named source-lc-02bdbf3e-aa78(lots more numbers) and replica-c0e4c027-(lots more numbers). The "Remove from inventory' and "Delete from disk" options are greyed out. Despite everything I've tried I cannot remove them from vCenter. Here is what I've tried:

1) Using vmware-cmd to register/unregister them. I can't unregister them but if I try registering them then another one by the same name appears, and I can delete that one from disk. Unfortunately that still leaves the other one behind.

2) Restarting vCenter services or the ESX hosts - tried both.

3) Manually deleting the files from Linux - this works but doesn't really do much to remove them from vCenter.

Any other thoughts?

[Troy_Clavell]

you may want to take a look at this blog.

http://blogs.vmware.com/view/2009/01/view-composer-how-to-delete-orphaned-replicasource-entries-in-v...

[VMmatty]

This appears to be the correct method, but unfortunately it won't work since I'm now at vCenter 4 and this isn't supported. When I ran the command I got "This VC version (4.0) is not supported."

I'm guessing at this point I'm stuck unless you know of another way to get rid of it from vCenter 4?

[Troy_Clavell]

Yeah, that's a tough one since you are running on a unsupported platform for View. I'll poke around a bit and see what I can find.

[VMmatty]

Thanks Troy. I'm actually just trying to get rid of this View test environment and this is the last bit. I just realized I never tried connecting to the host itself and removing them. When I did that I actually was able to manage the VMs and I tried removing them from inventory. That worked at the host level but now they appear as orphaned VMs in vCenter. I tried restarting the vCenter service and they're still there.

This post talks about how to get rid of them at the SQL database level. That might be my only option.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/958576#958576

Thanks again for your suggestions.

[allencrawford]

Did you ever find a solution to this? I'm in the same situation.

[mikebarnett]

Hi all,

The current version of SviConfig does not support vSphere and unfortunately cannot remove these files at this time. The best thing to do is file an SR with VMware Support as we do have a method to clean up these left over entities.

Ask your support engineer to contact Mike Barnett if they need assistance on this procedure.

Regards,

Mike

[allencrawford]

Thanks for the follow up, Mike. Everyone else, the VMware-supplied method works great btw.

[VMmatty]

In my situation, I ended up removing the host where the VMs lived from the cluster and adding it back. That removed these two legacy VMs from inventory. Not the greatest solution but it did the trick for me.